Author: Dale

Patio progress

Posted on by Dale

No musical updates today—I slept poorly and my brain just wasn’t in the mood to create whole universes this morning.

Fortunately[1] I could still be useful by helping with The Patio, Part II: The Harlequinading.

This is what we had at the end of yesterday:

To the untrained eye, this might appear to be harlequinadesque, but we (Cow-Tip, Squirrel, John, and I) were informed that it was in fact patchwork.  We didn’t want patchwork; we wanted harlequinade.  European farmland, not Kansan.

So this morning, I rearranged the above patch into:

I was gratified to learn that this was in fact what we wanted.

As of lunchtime today:

We have run out of pavers, so those have to be purchased and painted before we can keep working.

Maybe I’ll get back to Theseus and his boosterism tomorrow.

And happy 36th anniversary to my lovely first wife!

—————

[1] for differing values of “fortunate”

Dream One, two new pieces

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Don’t everybody get over-excited, but today we have two new sections of Dream One.

Lest you think that I was super industrious over the weekend, remember that I had worked on both of these all last week and only had the ending of each to hammer out.  Still, it is impressive, isn’t it?

The first is our old friend, Ariadne’s “My mother, bored and pampered.”  I had to work out her last phrase, “We map this fate forever,” in which I wanted Theseus to join her in a gentle lament.  I think it works.

Astute listeners will hear that I radically revamped the accompaniment to Ariadne’s climactic “I loved you—I love you!”  It’s very effective in a maudlin kind of way, and I’m wondering if it’s too Broadway.  Or am I forging new paths for La Scala?

The second new piece is the closing of our first Dream, “What of us?”  It starts with Daedalus reminding Ariadne that he too was trapped there, along with Icarus.  The music references “Fly and fall,” and then segues into the “machine music” motif as our trio retreat to their personal concerns.  (I am reminded of Sweeney Todd, where Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett often sing at cross-purposes, he of emotions and she of commerce.)  From there we reprise the opening chorus, “Let us joyfully gaze.”

On the whole, I’m quite pleased.  Next up: the beginning of this last segment of Dream One, transitioning from Icarus in the sky down to the control room.  It’s not a short piece of text, so this may take all week.  However, when I finish this, DREAM ONE WILL BE FINISHED, YOU GUYS!

Dream One, “My mother, bored and pampered” | score (pdf) | mp3

Dream One, “What of us?” | score (pdf) | mp3

Do not let me forget that I have to work out the “falling” motif.

Labyrinth update

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But first, a wonderful comment that my spam filter forwarded to me for evaluation:

What’s up to every one, for the reason that I am in fact eager of reading this webpage’s post to be updated on a regular basis.
It contains fastidious information.

Fastidious, that’s me all over.

I’m guessing that many people know that although the labyrinth occupies the majority of our back yard, there is a small portion on an upper level that does not belong to the labyrinth.  Nor does it “belong” to me.  It belongs to my lovely first wife, who has long desired a party patio.

The very nice stone wall that I built last September in the first burst of retirement was part of that effort, and in fact we had the sod laid in and some other little plantings done, but on the whole the result on the other side of the walkway—the patio itself—was unsatisfactory.

The LFW does not easily settle, her 36-year marriage to me (as of this Tuesday) notwithstanding, and so now we are embarked on getting exactly what she wants.

Here’s what our back yard looks like at the moment:

You will remark, no doubt, on the festive colors you are seeing.

Good shot of the successive approximation of the layout of the pavers by our team (Cow-Tip, Squirrel, and John—let me repeat that: Cow-Tip, Squirrel, and John), who have never in their careers been called upon to do anything of this nature but who are attacking the æsthetics of it all with great gusto.

Spoiler alert: this patchwork regularity is not what the LFW wants, but I am given to understand after a discussion on Friday afternoon that Cow-Tip, Squirrel, and John are now in complete alignment with her desires.  Also, it should be noted that the plastic sheet in the background is the actual location of the patio. The foreground is just the team’s staging area, guaranteed to kill off the sod we installed last year.

Stay tuned for further developments in The Patio, Part II: The Harlequinading.

Dream One / “Not Really Bad”

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Yesterday was pretty good, actually.  Having decided to skip the hard part of Ariadne’s bit and move on to the ending of Dream One, I found that it flowed very nicely and we have liftoff.  I still have some tweaking to do on it, but I think everyone will be pleased with the results.

Also, yesterday afternoon was the last session of the Newnan Theatre Company‘s KidsCamp Workshop that I taught.  As these things do, we ended up with a performance for the parental units, and I have to say that the kids acquitted themselves well.  Quick recap: the goal of the workshop was character development; the theme was “Villains.”  We spent the week in a wash of creative process—stealing David Seah‘s nifty mantra of EXPLORE | LEARN | BUILD | SHARE, we were able to defer judgment and decision-making until Thursday, really.  They generated multiple characters in their little notebooks, and we ended up with six monologs and three group presentations. (We had eighteen middle school students.)

They tended towards the sketch comedy end of the spectrum (with the concomitant maniacal cackling), but with only a week to produce, whattayagonnadoamirite?  I think that almost all of them were worth seeing and the fact that the kids developed every single bit it of themselves is worth something.  I regarded the whole workshop as an excuse to play with young minds and introduce them to the creative process.

The song was a hit.  I was quite pleased with the way the kids performed it and with the audience reaction.  It is a catchy, catchy song with multiple earworms.  I know, because I have trouble getting to sleep at night with it running through my head.

I got nothing. Leave me alone.

Posted on by Dale

No, I didn’t get anything done yesterday.  I spent the entire morning on the phone with tech support trying to figure out why every component of the network was functioning properly and yet I couldn’t get onto the internet.

The more cynical among you—and you know who you are—will suggest that not having internet might allow for more productivity, but screw you.  It is actually crucial to my process that I delete emails from ASCD and Al Franken every 20 minutes.

We still don’t know why nothing worked and yet everything worked.  Very Zen.  Eventually we restarted everything enough times and in the right order that presto! I was able to wish people a happy birthday on Facebook.

In other news, I’ve decided to skip the end to Ariadne’s “My mother” bit and whack out the end of the scene, since it’s just recitative and a reprise. And I’m not likely to get much done there today, either, because yesterday my iPad fell flat onto the floor in the black box at the theatre, and shattered the screen.  A trip to the shop is required.  ::sigh::

Dream One, “My mother”

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So here’s the next little section of “My mother, bored and pampered.”  I abandoned my interpolated text—although I reserve the right to come back and stick it in.

I’m posting this today even though I’m not sure I like any of it.  Some adventurous harmonies, but my compositional strategy of “listen to it over and over until it makes sense” may have failed me this time.  Will a conductor and cast take the time to understand it?  Does it in fact make sense musico-dramatically?

Oh well, unlike The Bridges of Madison County, this is not going to lose anyone millions of dollars, so I shall post it and then circle back to it later.

Dream One, “My mother,” 06/10/14 | score (pdf) | mp3  (The new stuff starts at about 1:10.)

Next, a little coda in which Ariadne and Theseus have a bittersweet duet, closing out that bit.  Then a bit of recitative from Daedalus, and then our “tinker-toy” theme kicks in to take us out to a reprise of “Let us joyfully gaze.”  Sounds simple enough.

Dream One, “My mother, bored and pampered”: some progress

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When last we left Ariadne, she was explaining how

  • her mother had sex with a bull
  • the resulting Minotaur, her half-brother, was put into the labyrinth
  • all of which is Daedalus’s fault

Today we get a little more: Theseus mentions his part in slaying the Minotaur, and Ariadne throws it in his face that he couldn’t have done it without her telling him the secret of getting in and back out again.

From here, I think we’re going to get a little interpolated text, just a little something for Ariadne and Theseus to sing before she launches into her I LOVE YOU DAMMIT bit.

I would like to state for the record that the piddling amount that is new in today’s selection represents days of my writing stuff that went absolutely nowhere, and you will notice that Ariadne’s last bit is still in the boogie-woogie style we started with.  Next section, pretty music.  I swear.

Dream One, “My mother, bored and pampered” | score (pdf) | mp3

An odd memory

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I don’t know why I thought of this last night, but I was meditating out by the fire in the labyrinth, and for some reason Summer Reading Clubs came to mind.

You  might think that my childhood bedroom was plastered with Summer Reading Club certificates, but you would be wrong.  I rarely earned one.

That is not to say, of course, that I didn’t read in the summer.  Au contraire, I read voraciously, hitting the Carnegie Public Library on the Court Square regularly all summer.  We would even walk or ride our bikes to downtown to get new books.

I read all the time, devouring science fiction series and nonfiction books about science and theatre.  Lots of art books, tons of “how-to” project books.  I even haunted the reference section which had art history books with actual tipped-in illustrations, and even at a young age I was put out that someone (I’m looking at you, Mrs. Wood) had cut out the Rubens nudes with scissors.  Seriously—just rip the entire tipped-in reproduction out if that’s your inclination; why go in and cut around the naked ladies?  (It occurs to me that it might not have been censorship, but porno-vandalism.  Simpler times.[1])

So what was the problem?  I dutifully got my little Reading Club flyer at the beginning of each summer, and I dutifully noted which books I had read, often filling up the form.

But I didn’t read the right kinds of books.

That’s right, my sweetlings, our Summer Reading Clubs were severely prescriptive in what you were “encouraged” to read.  You had to do so many nonfiction books, and so many fiction, and of those you had to read certain kinds, and if you didn’t, you didn’t earn the certificate.

As I sat by the fire last night, I just marveled and chortled at how stupid that was—but that’s the way education used to be (AND LARGELY STILL IS) through and through: the Way It Spozed to Be, as it were. (The linked title was published in 1969.  Nothing much has changed.  WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE??)

Why not provide alternative forms or checklists for different kinds of readers?  Given that boys gravitate towards nonfiction, why not tilt their requirements in that direction?  Why not let girls read nothing but Nancy Drew or Sweet Valley High?  Why not just say, “Hey, kid, read 25 books in these eight weeks, and you’re golden!”?

But no: a well-read young person reads broadly, not necessarily deeply.  Boys like nonfiction?  Girls like romances?  That is a deficiency which we must correct through our Summer Reading Program.  The whole thing was prescriptive: Thou shalt… and Thou shalt not…, with no thought to the inner life of the reader.

Ludicrous bullshit, of course, and I would like to think that summer reading programs are a little better set up here in the 21st century.  However, I don’t want to go find out.  I’m going to pretend that fifty years later, we’re doing it right.

—————
[1] Actually, not simpler at all.  If you wanted to gaze upon naked ladies, you had to jump through some serious hoops and cover some serious tracks.  Titian and Rubens might be your best bet to see a booby, and who am I to judge those who managed to excise their very own Sleeping Angelica for their prurient delights?  And God help you if you preferred naked men instead.  These modern times are much simpler, and better, and so say we all.

Treading water

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Here in the fourth scene of “Dream One” of Seven Dreams of Falling, we have Ariadne leading the way in a rather expository passage, i.e., the background of the Minotaur myth.  As she and Theseus trade pointed viewpoints about their roles in the story, it seems to me that we might want some kind of operatic give-and-take, if not an outright duet.  And it might still be an outright duet.

I can’t tell at this point, given that I’m treading water with the passage.  I have put a few tentative notes up on the screen, but nothing is appealing to me or making sense yet.  (For those who don’t know, I work in files that are labeled ‘Abortive Attempts,’ i.e., “4. Hark, abortive attempts,” where I simply abandon stuff that doesn’t work, insert new measures, and keep going.  Often I will find later that some of the abandoned material fits right in with the stuff that works.)

So nothing to report today, music composition-speakingwise.